It can be read like an essay and user guide, like a product catalogue with textual logic subverted and the order of the original databases mutated. These are image objects undergoing movement in and out of various user architectures, catalogues, brand pools, and other contexts, given new conceptual brands and material identities by our imposed topics and memes.
R-U-In?S began as an aggregator turning found content into instant material ruin by framing it as an artifact found in the future or found by a removed civilization with no understanding of human culture. Through this distance, content was read for its basic material properties and a new conceptual logic began to emerge, one that is a commentary on the anthroplogical view of the image databases on the internet and the imagery left behind by brands and other architectural empires. It is an archeological e-waste sifter that also sought to create new value. It does this by breaking down found content into parts and repurposing those parts. However, since the aggregator also exists inside the viral and algorithmic but human-controlled databases of Tumblr, Google Image Search, and other websites, it also became a study of its own content. Working as a mix between the outsourced decision of what becomes a meme and the critical intent of individual artists, the resulting database of content is continually evolving as material is re-aggregated and the original meme continues to mutate.
Essentially what emerges as the product of this process are memetic performances that imbue the act of reblogging or directory naming with a biological or material behavior. These memes go through the same periods of construction, attraction, propagation, and decay as any micro empire, material cohesion, or organism trying to survive. They work on meta and micro levels. The internet speeds this process up to an almost instant fluidity, one that can expand worldwide in a matter of minutes, then evaporate or speciate into oblivion. Will the meme get so big it gets broken up into 5 new micro memes? Will it enter an aggregation battle with a competing brand and lose to the merger? Will it fail to adapt and die out, living on in its versioned iterations?
How does a meme colonize as a product, and how does it eventually die out? What does this reveal about the global market today, in a world of brand-as-product, product-as-culture, and image-as-object?
Each account becomes a production site. By rebranding and reauthoring this content, a new product is formed that is the uncanny translational ghost or back-end of an existing one, one which usually has a critically distanced lens on the former. The faraway logic of TOSHIBA mutates into TTOSHIBAA, a brand that has nothing to do with the original, the record button becomes WHEREISTHEBLOOD?, the shiny black finish of products from the late capitalist era becomes a meme called BLACK MARKET, THEN BLACK PLANET, THEN TERRA PRETA as it sinks into the past. PHILIPS 2013 takes the ridiculous intentions of the Philips product empire to a new end, DATEISMO lives in a distanced soil where everything has deteriorated, especially visual order and authority.
When the raw material of the networked blogs moves into "presentation mode" we are explaining our own activity through its results. The activity is always focused on a critical investigation into the material and conceptual empirical forces surrounding us in body and mind.
CATALOGUE #001 was compiled in early 2010 with material from 2009
Released FEBRUARY 2010
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